'Good master soldier,' cried Lashmer, 'I tell you he is still abed, and you cannot see him this two hours.'
'Nay, by this bright honour, but I will see him,' said the other.
'And yet I think you will not,' said Lashmer; 'and yet again, by this bright honour is a good oath, and a gentleman's oath, and one that may not be sworn to a lie or a thing that is not true, unless, indeed, there be provocation; for provocation, look you, master soldier, excuses many things. It is your great peacemaker.'
'Why, this is monstrous logic,' returned the bass, 'and such as I never heard all the time I was sergeant-groom under the Signor John Peter Pugliano, esquire of the Emperor's stables, a man of most fertile Italian wit. What need of the philosopher's stone, if by mere logic you can make of provocation a peacemaker?'
'Well, softly now, and I will show you,' answered Lashmer, whose talk served often to wile a dull hour, since he had been to Cambridge and gleaned I know not what stray scraps of learning that careless students had dropped in his way,—'I will show you how a man will come to swear the peace of another for some assault, or battery, or mayhem, or anything, and that other shall show provocation. Then shall no peace be sworn, and they shall be at one again. For it shall appear that he who battered the other did him no wrong, seeing there was provocation in it. So they that thought they had quarrel shall find by this same sweet provocation that they have none.'
'Then must I provoke all men,' said the sergeant-groom, 'if I would live at peace with them.'
'Ay, by this bright honour,' said Lashmer; 'then no matter how often you get a bloody coxcomb, yet shall you never have quarrel with any man.'
'Then will I now most lovingly break your pate,' said the other, 'that you may stand my friend and bring me to your master. For my master, the most excellent esquire, Henry Waldyve, bade me spare no pains to see your master as soon as possible.'
Whether my servant's logic would have been put to this severe test I cannot say, for at Harry's name I sprang out of bed and cried from the window that I would see the messenger forthwith.
I hurried from my chamber to find Harry's servant discussing his morning ale with Lashmer. He rose to a stiff military position as I entered, and made me a most lofty salute with his Spanish hat. He was a tall, soldierly-looking man of about forty years of age, with a peaked beard and very fierce moustaches that had been nicely disciplined in the Spanish fashion to curl nearly up to his eyes. By his side hung a very terrible 'schiavona,' which he wore instead of a rapier, after the fashion of the German reiters, considering, as he afterwards told me, that the broadsword was the only fit weapon for horsemen. It had a great steel closed hilt, presenting such a defiant tangle of rings, hilt-points, and twisted bars after the latest pedantic fancy as to make the beholder tremble to think what the blade must be.